Research Finds Happiness is Infectious
"Changes in individual happiness can ripple through social networks and generate large scale structure in the network, giving rise to clusters of happy and unhappy individuals."
Happiness really does rub off—a person's happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected, finds research published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Happiness is not just an individual experience or choice, but is dependent on the happiness of others to whom individuals are connected directly and indirectly, and requires close proximity to spread, say the authors. For example, a friend who becomes happy and lives within a mile increases your likelihood of happiness by 25%.
Professor Nicholas Christakis from Harvard Medical School and Professor James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego, found that it is not only immediate social ties that have an impact on happiness levels, the relationship between people's happiness can extend up to three degrees of separation (to the friend of one's friends' friend). Indeed, people who are surrounded by happy people are likely to become happy in the future.
Importantly, they report that close physical proximity is essential for happiness to spread. A person is 42% more likely to be happy if a friend who lives less than half a mile away becomes happy, the effect is only 22% for friends who live less than two miles away, and this effect declines and becomes insignificant at greater distances.
The findings suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals.
The authors say: "Changes in individual happiness can ripple through social networks and generate large scale structure in the network, giving rise to clusters of happy and unhappy individuals."
They conclude: "Most important from our perspective is the recognition that people are embedded in social networks and that the health and well-being of one person affects the health and well-being of others. This fundamental fact of existence provides a fundamental conceptual justification for the specialty of public health. Human happiness is not merely the province of isolated individuals."
In an accompanying editorial, Professor Andrew Steptoe from University College London and Professor Ana Diez Roux from University of Michigan School of Public Health, say that the study is "groundbreaking": "If, [as these findings suggest] happiness is indeed transmitted through social connections, it could indirectly contribute to the social transmission of health," and has serious implications for the design of policies and interventions.
